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Last week I added a little side-feature to the newsletter—an application by which readers could apply to all of the projects featured in Proof of Work, plus a few blockchain-related companies like Coinbase and Radar Relay. That blew up, and reading people’s answers to the “coolest thing you’ve done or built” question was one of the best parts of my week. An artist-in-residence at CERN, several people with 8 figure startup exits, founders of some interesting crypto projects… the talent avalanche into crypto is very real. For those of you who haven’t already applied, go ahead and do so now!

Our friends at Opendime have kindly offered to give away 10 packs of Opendime Wallets, and 10 sets of stickers to Proof of Work subscribers! The winners will be chosen from our subscriber pool and notified in the next issue. I grew up reading cyberpunk authors like William Gibson and Neil Stephenson, so the OPENDIME is one of my absolute favorite crypto-gadgets out there—very stoked to have some to pass around.

Finally, the MIT Bitcoin Expo is a great conference (reasonably priced, put on by students, strong tech focus) and I’ll be there on the 18th. Tickets are here, but not many left—if you come, find me and say hi! We also have one ticket to give away—to avoid having my inbox destroyed, please ping me on Twitter to claim that. First come, first served.

This issue brings another great addition to the PoW roster: Polkadot, a project from Parity Labs which aims to increase blockchain interoperability.

Paige & Zooko from Zcash

We finally got 1.0.15 out the door! Here’s the release announcement which details the changes in this release. It mostly focuses on implementing Overwinter code and an activation height for testnet (207500) but also includes a new experimental feature, z_mergetoaddress, which simplifies the process of combining many small UTXOs and notes into a few larger ones.

We also officially announced Overwinter—Let us know if there’s something that doesn’t get covered properly or is confusing!

The next release, 1.1.0, is planned to introduce an activation block height for Overwinter on the main network if all testing and auditing goes well over these next several weeks. You can keep track of the 1.1.0 release in the associated milestone

First Zcash conference is happening in June in Montreal. No sponsor booths, no ICO promotions, just a small event of awesome people building the future of privacy tech.

Doug from Livepeer

Livepeer.tv featured high quality backstage live streams and interviews from the Blockstack Summit and Berlin Ethereum Meetup [ed: cool that this is actually getting used!]

Smart contract audits and security review are under way with Trail of Bits.

New p2p networking proposal is being discussed for content delivery solutions in the early days of Livepeer’s mainnet alpha.

Custom GCN3 Cubehash implementation completed for new AMD miner as it was found to be the next bottleneck after Lyra2. Lyra2 validation and end-to-end Lyra2REv2 validation still ongoing, custom keccak implementation to start shortly. Host code integration of the kernel is complete.

Published a preliminary design of our collections mechanism for Blockstack Gaia Storage which will allow dApps to interact with data such as a user's photos or notes shared between apps. Read more about the design here.

Hosted the sold out Blockstack Signature Berlin event: a day of technical learning sessions and a conference with speakers such as Edward Snowden and Nick Szabo.

Hosted a 2-day hackathon in Berlin. Winning app was as Instragram alternative. More winners and photos here.

Opened up a pipeline for dApp funders to be matched to promising dApp creators.

Will from 0x

Heads down working on 0x protocol v2 [ed: no explainer for v2 yet, but the technically inclined can get a good picture of what’s coming by looking at these PRs]

Put in an offer for a new SF office space (we are growing).

Diego and Riccardo for Monero

The Monero community has decided to up the ringsize to a minimum of 7. This is to increase user privacy and to mitigate the harmful effects on privacy from coins that fork Monero's blockchain. This will go into effect with the March hard fork. [ed: big news. Monero transactions are already pretty big so this will make them more expensive, but in my opinion the additional privacy is very worth it]

Sia v1.3.2-RC2 is out. The 2nd release candidate includes bug fixes and optimizations for the Download overhaul recently implemented. Sia version 1.3.2 should be generally available in the next few days assuming no significant bugs are discovered.

One of the oldest open Feature Requests is now actively being developed. Ratelimit is a new Nebulous maintained repo for a specially built bandwidth limiter. This bandwidth limiter will tie into Sia and users will be able to specify bandwidth limits. This feature will most likely be released in Sia v1.3.3. You can follow the development here.

Congratulations to @RBZL#6205 for his excellent new website siasetup.info, which provides a simple guide to getting setup on the Sia network as a host or renter.

Helena & Jutta from Polkadot

Gavin Wood published Polkadot's governance draft. This draft outlines the voting, staking, and referenda mechanisms that will allow the Polkadot Network to keep the network healthy and evolve gracefully.

The Web3 Foundation talks about how Polkadot is scaling using PoA chains before kicking off the ScalingNOW! conference in Barcelona

Completed the first 50 interviews for the ETHPrize Bounty initiative—Will be making a huge public announcement at ETHcc.

JZ from Decred

It’s been a busy week for Decred, Jake published the 2018 roadmap [ed: worth a look]which includes some details on the status of Lightning Network, our unique privacy features, as well as Politeia, our blockchain tethered proposal system. It also included a tease for an upcoming proposal the community will have the opportunity to vote on funding; a decentralized exchange built upon the atomic swap tools Decred released last year.

We also issued a snapshot of the dev activity for the month of February which included 242 active PRs, 230 commits, 27,147 additions, and 13,960 deletions in total spread across 5-7 devs per repo.

Ari from Decentraland

We started working with Etheremon.com as part of our SDK beta program, building their game on Decentraland.

Our client (world viewer) is now displaying verified cryptocollectibles. All interactions now work in VR.

We've implemented our first shader and added a lot of missing A-Frame entities for compatibility.

Our LAND Marketplace now has a wallet, where you can see your holdings, as well as an activity view for watching past txs.

We redeployed a reviewed LAND Contract as an ERC721, since this standard is going to be incorporating all the improvements we made in our ERC821 proposal.

Ryan from FOAM

We pushed two consecutive releases this week addressing bugs to the 600 users beta testing the FOAM Spatial Index, as well as held a developer AMA to discuss with the community.

We’re making exciting progress on our token issuance model and inflation curves. For FOAM we want to measure the supply of tokens over space, correlated to the number of physical places that have validators offering Proof of Location services, whereas in Bitcoin for example supply is measured over time.

Antonio from dYdX

Generalizing our short sell protocol to work with any decentralized exchange

Working with market makers, traders, and liquidity providers to ensure dYdX has early liquidity

Sam from OpenBazaar

The upcoming 2.1.1 release is in testing, and the developers hosted their bi-weekly call, which developers can apply to join here.

Michael & Tom from Dfinity

DFINITY's Robert Lauko did a podcast on the network's Random Beacon, security, PoS systems and on-chain governance with the Zero Knowledge team.

Arthur Falls released a short video on the people behind DFINITY and a collection of related podcasts.

Hsin-Ju & Jed from Stellar

Jed & Yoni (CEO of eToro) just did a meetup in Tel Aviv today on the Future of Blockchain. Livestream / recording can be found here

Kicked off redundant round of smart contract audits with a second auditing team

Started building out main-net deployment procedures / tooling

Demi from Zeppelin

ZeppelinOS development is moving fast! We created ZeppelinOS Core Github repo, added a collection of smart contracts with upgradeability mechanisms, and published zos-core npm package

The OpenZeppelin community keeps growing, reaching 100 Github contributors. Thank you to all our amazing developers and users! If you want to join our community and contribute to a codebase used by 100+ projects in the space, check our GitHub repo